We Live Our Lives In Boxes
by LogicBomb.32
Summary: I think, maybe, I've always been falling in love with you. I just didn't know it.


**We Live Our Lives In Boxes**

**Logicbomb.32**

Remember that night we went driving and you showed me the first dirt road I'd ever been on? Remember how scared I was and how I tried to play it off like it was nothing, but secretly you know how fast my heart was beating so you took my hand in yours. I swear, that night, that's when I knew. In that moment even, when you took my hand and pressed your lips delicately against the flat of palm, I knew I was falling in love with you.

People say there isn't a difference between being in love and falling in love, but I beg to differ. Someone can love someone else but not fall in love with that person. They can get married and have kids and grow old together, it happens all the time. But to fall in love with someone, that's like winning the lottery or finding twenty bucks in your pocket.

Maybe it started that night in the car on the country road, or maybe it'd been happening since we were kids. Back when we spent all summer running around in neon bikinis and thought we were big and brave just because we could walk to the park by ourselves. Back when we were just best friends, naïve because we didn't know that there were lines best friends weren't supposed to cross. Maybe it was when you shared your animal crackers with me during lunch.

I couldn't tell you when it started.

I think, maybe, I've always been falling in love with you. I just didn't know it. I called it protecting my best friend and loyalty. I hid behind red plastic cups and sexual escapades just to trick myself into thinking what we had wasn't real. I don't know though, really, I don't. Because if I've always been falling in love with you, does that mean one day I'm going to hit the ground?

I've been falling and falling and falling for so long that it seems impossible for me to not, one day, crash. But I don't want to crash because crashing, after falling for so many years, is going to hurt. It would hurt so bad I'm not sure I could piece myself back together again. I might just lie there, broken and missing you for the rest of my life.

Maybe someone would try to piece the parts of me back together again. Maybe they'd be able to do it, do it almost all the way. But even if they did, they could never have the whole me because I'd be missing a piece. My heart, because it's yours. You have that piece of me and you'll have it forever. You'll have it when we're old and grey and yelling at CNA's at the nursing home. You'll have it if we break up and I run half way around the world just to try and fix my broken heart. You'll always have it. It's yours.

I don't know when you got it. I don't remember giving it to you, because if I had I would have put it in a pink box and wrapped it with the kitten themed wrapping paper you love. I would have slipped it under your pillow so when you went to sleep that night you would open it. I wouldn't have minded giving it to you like that, you've known it was yours from the moment we kissed in the seventh grade.

I took a little bit more convincing. But you waited and waited and gently persuaded me that what we have isn't wrong. That I'm not the sinner society tells me I am. That our love, our friendship, our everything, is exactly right and no one should be able to tell me otherwise _After all _you'd whisper _you're Santana fucking Lopez. _

I want to remember the night I gave you my heart, but maybe it was a small moment. So small I didn't even notice it happening. Like the way you slipped letters into my backpack in between classes and then disappear after Glee Club so I could read them. Maybe it was like that, or maybe my heart just jumped out of my chest and into your hands. Maybe you held it tight, refusing to let go, even when I was scared and angry with everyone and everything. Maybe that's why I came back, because you had my heart and I couldn't survive on my own without it, without you.

Or maybe you've had it all along. Maybe you had it from the moment we met, back in the first grade when my mom was late picking me up, and you sat next to me under the slide for a full hour so I didn't have to be alone. I like thinking about that day, although it's hazy now. Bits and pieces have blurred together but I remember, crystal clear, when you held my hand. How you held it tight when the thunder cracked and I jumped so violently I hit my head against the bottom of the slide. How you whispered that thunder was just God and the Angels bowling and lightening was when they got a strike. I remember those two moments in such clarity they could have happened yesterday.

Maybe they did happen yesterday. Maybe the moments like that, the little moments that are engrained in my brain, are what made me start falling in love with you. I mean they're dotted all across my childhood, like pricks of light that lead the way to where I am now. It's all because of you Britt.

You held me in your arms when my parents divorced and I was convinced it was because my grades weren't good enough. You climbed through my window the night I texted you and told you I wanted to run away because I hated everything. You kissed me the first time I had a panic attack and then kissed me some more when it helped. You lied about how you felt when I asked you because you knew I wasn't ready for it, and how I wasn't ready to accept myself.

I could go on and on, but they all prove the same point, that I'm yours. I always have been and no matter what I tried to tell myself or who I slept with, nothing changed that fact. So when I hit the wall, and I hit it hard, you were there to stop me from running into again and again and instead, you showed me how to take the wall down.

I owe you so much.

I look at us now, moving box after box into the loft we rent, and I can't help but smile. Even though you've seen me and you're looking at me as if this is the first time we're meeting. You put the box down, the one with **Fragile **written in sharpie all over it, and start walking towards me. You're so close now that our noses touch and our arms are wrapped around each others waists. We don't say anything, we just stare at each other, enjoying this unexpectedly quiet moment. I blink and reach up to kiss you, a slow, smoldering kiss that draws the air right out of my lungs. You hug me tighter and smile into the kiss.

I know we've got piles of boxes to unpack but it doesn't matter, I don't care. They can wait because they'll be there in the morning just the same as they are now. This though, this won't wait, this moment will either happen or pass us by. But really Britt, we could have no boxes to unpack and not a cent to our name, but as long as I had you, it wouldn't matter.

_Short and sweet. Let me know what you think yeah?_


End file.
